


It Is Not Courage

by Scuffin_MacGuffin



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Dragon Age Kink Meme, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-30
Updated: 2014-03-30
Packaged: 2018-01-17 12:27:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1387597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scuffin_MacGuffin/pseuds/Scuffin_MacGuffin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>There comes another Blight.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Is Not Courage

**Author's Note:**

> One of my earliest kink meme pieces; the original can be found [here](http://dragonage-kink.livejournal.com/8832.html?thread=32978304#t32978304). Please note: I was conflicted about whether to tag this as Hawke/Anders. This story certainly depends upon this relationship and makes it central, but it is not ultimately all about it, and I don't want to mislead anyone who is looking for a straight-up shippery story. So take that into consideration before reading.

+

There comes another Blight.

On why it comes, when it comes, there is disagreement and hand-wringing, as there is over every war or plague or spilt pail of milk.

Some blame the mages, and their rebellion: their power and their secrets kept hidden in a half-shattered fortress tucked away on the fringes of a dying empire. Secrets are demon-swaddled things, festering so well in shadow -- and Lusacan is the Dragon of Night.

Others disagree: blood calls Evil as well as secrets, they say, and the Templars have been spilling plenty.

The wise say nothing, only spit in recognition of foul luck. Wisdom isn’t enough to keep them from dying by the thousands, but it’s enough to keep their spines stiff before the blows.

No matter what folk say, the war rages on.

The Blight breaks around it.

On another mountain in another fortress, not half-shattered but gone half-mad, the Wardens count the warnings they had somehow managed to not be counting all along. In Vimmark, in Kirkwall, in curst Amaranthine with its curst disappearing Commander (the Hero of Ferelden, decidedly not showing up again to be the Hero of Anywhere Else). Omens upon omens. Sodding rotten luck. Beneath them, an Architect sits architect-ing and wonders at the depths of the lonely roads he’s inherited. To the south, a cast-out magister casts itself back in, and it takes its tainted, frayed-edge God with it. To the north, the winds gust relentlessly over the steppes and crash against the fortress walls with all the force of a drunken accusation.

The Wardens stand accused, but they have no strength to gather. Weisshaupt’s gates stay shut.

Above, the Maker may, or may not, hear prayers.

+

Starkhaven is an old city, old as the trade of the merchants whose ships have ever been running up and down the slowly rolling Minanter. Trade is good some years and bad others -- life is good some years, and bad others, the locals will tell you, and shrug, and try to laugh.

No one remembers worse years than this.

The ships that bump up against the wharfs now are full of scared refugees instead of valued goods, and that’s only if they’re not half-burnt and filled with bodies. The bodies and the boats flow downstream as the taint flows downstream, and everyone knows the creeping shape of their doom by the drowned ghoul-children that float black-eyed in the river with the dead, poisoned fish.

It ought be too many to burn, but Starkhaven is an old city: Starkhaven’s pyres run hot. It’s been standing since before the first Blight ever began, and its Prince is determined that it will be standing long after the last. He still has obligations, after all. Apostates to behead, cities to raze.

That sort of thing.

He makes no vows. Words are worth so little, he’s learned. Words can cost so much.

But when the Blight breaks over Starkhaven, his arrows are sharp, his armies are strong, and his eyes are narrow and ready.

+

Dragonfire burns hot enough to melt stone, men, to melt any semblance of courage under a pure frothy onslaught of fear. It is not courage that keeps them there, that holds their lines for days and ruthless days of assault. _Duty,_ is what the Prince calls this thing that binds their hands to their weapons and their feet to the newly-ruined haunts of their city -- _survival,_ his men say, and that’s good enough for them.

The battle is chaos, massacre after massacre, small people with their arms around their children hiding wherever they can, however they can, hoping not to die. They do die, as entire districts are erased, useless barricades that can’t hold up under boiling, swooping barrages that come at random from the sky. The army cannot halt the Darkspawn’s progress. On the third day, they lose the gates. On the fifth, the keep is flattened, tumbling stone crushing the masses taking shelter there. The city’s survivors trickle dumbly to the Chantry to lick their wounds and count in shock how few of them are left, and listen to the Dragon’s screams echo shaking through the walls. The army scrapes itself together and mutinously considers retreat. The slowly rolling Minanter ceases rolling, stopped up with oil and bodies and seeping violet flame.

On the eighth day, the Mage shows up. He is skinny-armed and patchy-feathered and there are the lines of a cocky suicide grin written into his face, though at the moment he’s not wearing it. Tired, is the look he’s mostly wearing now, wandering heavily into what’s left of their last encampment -- the army is not normally in the habit of letting unannounced passersby through their lines, but for all that this one screams _mage_ from the toes of his boots to the tip of his staff, they let him through: he’s alive, after all, human even, and that formerly broad distinction is now become so narrowly, desperately important.

He shuffles in by a fire and puts his hands out over it and when he’s offered a share of what rations remain, he quietly accepts. No one pays him much mind, for a while at least -- no one has much mind left to pay.

But the Prince, when he leaves his tent, goes still for a single, startled-eye moment -- and then he promptly tries to put an arrow through his throat.

The Mage is maybe not as tired as he seems, or perhaps he is just used to the necessity of vigilance even through muffling layers of exhaustion. He is turning before the soft _plick_ of the string ever sounds, and the arrow freezes in the air a good arms-length away from him, stopped mockingly, ruthlessly short of piercing the shadows beating at his pulse. He lets it hang there for a moment so fleeting as to scarcely be worth the name before lowering his hand. The shaft shatters at his feet. Quivering chips of ice and wood leap and skitter and douse themselves against the hard, grey dirt.

“Your Highness,” he acknowledges, enough energy remaining in him for the barest scraping of dry, brittle humor -- if he didn’t have energy enough for humor, it could be for no lesser reason than his own death: a whittled corpse with no room left for fundamentals. Spirits aren’t much for letting irony leak into their weary, clear voices, after all. His mouth twists. The Prince fumes. Uncertainly, the men who’d been sharing his fire step back, hands lingering by their blades.

“You _dare,”_ spits the Prince.

The Mage shrugs. Of course he dares.

He’s here, isn’t he?

“How’s your Blight?” he wants to know, and watches with interest as the soldiers droop around him, as if struck, a collection of spindly, crushed weeds. This what failure tastes like: cold ash in the air. This is what failure tastes like: the friendly scorn of a stranger.

The Prince looks at him like he is sick, like he is a stain he doesn’t quite know how to remove, is afraid there is no way to remove, not truly, not so that looking at your swatch of clean cloth is enough to stop you remembering the blot that previously marred it. The Prince looks at him like he is killer.

The Prince is a killer. He is a killer.

The lack of pretense is -- some might call it refreshing.

“Is there some purpose to this?” the Prince finally wants to know, tongue cutting with precision, words slow and tight and furious under his voice’s low lilt. “Some reason for your presence you’d like to explain before I order my men to kill you?”

The men in question smarten up at that, and remember to look properly threatening. Solid stances, swords drawn -- the Mage has seen it all before. Scoffed at it, too. He doesn’t scoff now, but he does take in the hopeless set of their faces: haggard faces, hungry faces, with scraped-out, hollow eyes, drained of even the faint impressions left by prayers for friends they’ve long since lost. Their weapons dull from use, their hanging, tired arms, their Prince practically crackling in his burn-blackened armor. It’ll have been a long time since it’s last seen its customary shine.

“Not so well, then,” he observes, ignoring the question, ignoring a pair of narrowed blue eyes. Turned away from the fire, his hands are growing cold. He goes to fist them in his pockets, and then remembers he’d stripped out his pockets for bandages and bootlaces long ago. It’s hard to keep having to remember things like this. He sticks them under his arms instead. “No Wardens in the city, I expect?”

“There are no Wardens anywhere, and I know you well know it.” There is a pause, shifting and uncomfortable. “We are not incapable of mounting our own defenses.”

“No, just incapable of holding them, it seems.” The men rumble, stuck somewhere between resignation and bristling pride. He can feel them thinking -- _we’re still alive, doesn’t that count for something?_ And also -- _we’re still alive, but remember all those who aren’t._

The Mage knows the feeling.

“Look, here’s something for free,” he says. “You can hold out as long as you like, but you can’t kill that thing without a Warden.”

The Prince stares, hard.

“Without me,” he adds, just in case that wasn’t clear.

“You aren’t a Warden,” the Prince accuses. “You’re a murderer, and you can lay claim to no other title. You’ve run away from everything else.” It’s escaped no one’s notice that the Mage is alone. “Everyone else.”

“It’s not a thing you stop being. Stop doing.” Running or Warden-ing, he realizes it’s not clear which he means -- doesn’t matter. Both apply. A pang tugs through him at the thought, aching wearily in his work-worn knuckles, in the tenderly-touched skin of his lips, but its last regretful echo is already days behind him now. He lets it go. “Use your head, would you. I didn’t come here for the warm welcome.”

A hard edge of frustration, then, washing bitter over the well of the grief beneath. “You butcher, you shouldn’t have come here at all!”

“Ah, forgive me then. I’ll just go, shall I? And once the Blight is cleared up you can send some men after me, and we’ll keep playing our fun little game of cat-and-mouse.” He’d have to fight his way out of the city, but it wouldn’t be any more difficult than fighting his way into it. Darkspawn one way, darkspawn the other, and a few exhausted soldiers in between. “Maybe if you ask prettily enough the Archdemon will just up and kill itself.”

The silence is deafening. The silence is so deafening, so jagged against their eardrums, that it seems impossible that any of them should be able to hear a distant, wind-born shriek.

They all it hear it anyway.

“Tell us, then,” says the Prince, voice soft. “Tell the secret. Tell how to kill the beast.”

The Mage grimaces. “It’s no secret. It’s pure magic. Make me a pin-cushion after, but I’m telling you, you need me now.”

“Magic.”

“Yes, magic.”

The Prince thinks about it.

It’s distant sort of thinking, and there’ a distance to be observed: peaking far-away along the wounded grey horizon, nestled somewhere in between the smoke escaping faintly to the dawn’s dull sky and the earth shivering deadly beneath their feet. Rotting with a thousand giggling, niggling creatures gladly gorging on their wealth of conquered flesh, heaving with the stomachs of the remnants of a fear-sick army. In the soot and in the stone and in the ashy black pyres, in the Mage’s fingers burrowing for warmth into his armpits and in the Prince’s frost-bright eyes surrendering some measure of their long-held heat -- somewhere, a conclusion is reached.

“When this is over, I will see you tried,” the Prince finally tells him. “And hanged.”

The Mage laughs, then, tired and crooked and certain. One last fleck of mirth, one last dreg of self to stir.

“Yes,” he says. “Sure you will.”

+

The Champion comes to Starkhaven the way the Champion nearly always comes to things: too little and too late to do much more than pick up the pieces.

Picking up the pieces is not an inconsequential job, mind you. There are and were and will always be many pieces far too great for any but a champion to pick them up. Shattered mirrors and war-worthy relics and lovers dead by the thrust of a beloved’s blade, vengeances great and small and deserved and not, skies bright with flame and courtyards dark with blood and many more littler messes besides, and other things that maybe don’t need picking up but get picked up anyway out of sheer, lonely force of habit: gritty fragments of tiger’s eye and woven bracelets half-unwoven and trousers in every state of disrepair that it is possible for trousers to be in. Every now and then all there is to pick up is the tab, and for those times the Champion is grateful.

This is not one of those times.

There’s the demon. Dragon. Arch-thingy. It’s dead though, so he’s probably not going to have to lift that one. If he’s feeling generous he might offer his help in rolling its leaking carcass from the square.

There’s still that ancient magister running around, slithering from body to body, more crazed than ever in mourning for its dear, dead God. For now, at least, the thing’s retreated and given them all a bit of a reprieve -- the Champion knows he might well still have to figure out how to collect that particular piece (again), but he doesn’t especially feel like it right now.

Then there’s the Prince, calmly fletching arrows in the square, hands working steadily as he dispenses orders to his lieutenants darting to and fro around him.

He looks like a man at the end of something. Or at the beginning. The Champion’s gut clenches.

“What did you do to him,” he wants to know -- needs to know -- should have known already, the way he should never have let the man in question out of his sight in the first place, foregone conclusions curling regretfully into the rumpled space that when he’d gone to sleep had still been occupied by a warm body. A much more substantial sleeping companion than the resignation he’d left behind, on the whole, for all that the years had hollowed him out with guilt and burdensome certainty, beating hard beneath his ribs.

He’d been bloody difficult to track. Evasiveness is a skill you maybe ought to expect your apostate lover to probably have, the Champion supposes.

Maybe it’s just safer to always expect to be surprised.

The Prince regards him thoughtfully, a man who enters a room he hasn’t seen since he was a boy and realizes that it is not quite so big as he remembers. “Nothing,” he replies, not bothering to stand from his seat on a toppled pillar, comfortable and familiar as a log dragged before a campfire -- well, half the city is still burning. To be fair, he does have one leg in a splint. “There isn’t a mark on him; you can check for yourself. His body is in the Chantry.”

The Champion does check for himself, and he finds no marks, and he smooths sooty hair away from a cold, cold face, and he thinks this is the most jagged piece he’s ever had to shoulder.

+

The Prince watches the Champion returning, arms stiff by his sides as he trudges over the cobbled, gore-smeared stones of the square, rough face washed over with dusk’s bruised light. There are advisers who hover and fret and insist that he should come in away from the dark -- they are eyeing the Champion too, and they perhaps do not relish what they see in the set of his shoulders. It would be a shame to have to find another Prince so soon after getting this one brand new, especially since they’ve only just managed to break him in. Or mostly managed, more accurately -- at the moment he is inflexible to their advising, and they leave in a huff as he waves them away.

The Champion stops in the middle of the square to stare long and hard at the lolling, grinning face of the downed Dragon, its fat pulpy snake of a tongue, the hole punched black and seeping between its nightmare eyes by the business end of a staff. The Prince doesn’t begrudge him the time. He turns back to the intricate work of the fletching another arrow. They’ll need replacements, after the siege they’ve endured, and this at least is a task he knows, so familiar that his hands can feel out the pattern of it even in the near-dark. Hot glue pooling messily in the grooves of his nails, the subtle brush of feathers against his cheek.

When he looks up again, the Champion is sitting next to him.

He examines him, carefully, like he might test the balance of a heartwood shaft, the heft and potential of a newly-carved bow. Takes in his bowed head, the grey in his beard. Turns to his own heart and prods a sullen knot of pain, left festering for so, so long.

In the silence, he remembers they were once friends.

“It was quick,” he offers, after a time. “The Dragon dead, and then an eruption of light. He was on the ground, after.” Quick enough and comfortable enough -- what came before it hadn’t been, but then what do you expect burning and hacking and shooting your way through an overrun, overwrought city, old wounds and old hatred itching at your back -- he wouldn’t say he hadn’t suffered. They had all suffered. “It was a fitting penance.”

"It wasn't penance," barks the Champion. “He didn’t _need_ penance.”

The Mage is dead. They cannot ask him what he needed, why he thought he could find it here. They cannot ask what bout of selflessness overtook him, what burst of guilt brought him low. Maybe it was only that the Archdemon called to him, as it called to all those with his blood, and maybe he had finally decided to come. Maybe it was greater than that.

Redemption often is.

“It wasn’t penance,” insists the Champion again.

But the Prince thinks he knows better.

+


End file.
